Linked List: January 2012

Tuesday, 31 January 2012

Apple chief Tim Cook, making his first high-profile hire since
taking the helm of the world’s largest technology company, lured
the well-regarded industry executive to fill a critical post once
held by Ron Johnson, another outsider who left Target Corp to join
Apple in 2000. […]

Browett, Dixons’ CEO since 2007, was previously chief executive of
Tesco Plc’s successful online shopping site. He will oversee
Apple’s retail strategy and the expansion of its stores around the
world, from the current total of around 300.

You don’t see many executives trading up from CEO of one company to senior vice president of another. That Browett is from Europe is a pretty good signal that international expansion is a top priority for Apple retail.

I stumbled across this earlier today when I asserted that the iPhone is now far more popular and profitable then the iPod ever was. Figured I should double check that, just to make sure. Not only is it true, but after last quarter it’s not even close. iPod unit sales followed a fairly regular pattern: about 10 million units sold per quarter for the first nine months of each calendar year, then a little over 20 million units sold each holiday quarter. Apple sold just under 23 million iPods in Q109 (the 2008 holiday quarter) — until this last quarter, that was the highest-ever quarterly unit sales number for an Apple product segment. Not only did the iPhone break the 30-million mark last quarter, but with a grand total of 37 million it came damn close to breaking the 40-million mark. Think about that: Apple had never sold 30 million of anything in a quarter and almost sold 40 million iPhones.

Now think about what happens if iPad sales continue to grow at their current trajectory.

Sony’s Kate Dugan admitted that despite the natural disasters in
Japan that affected production and shipment of its digital
cameras, “true decline” has set in for digital cameras, in which
sales are down 20 percent, the first time losses have hit in the
double digits. The exodus is most pronounced amongst entry level
users, who have turned to their phones as their all-in-one
must-have gadget.

Dugan said that meant Sony has to focus on things phones can’t
achieve, such as “high optical zoom, low light shooting, full HD
video.” The way the company sees it, phones are fine to shoot food
on the fly, but for “important moments should go to cameras.”

Compare and contrast Sony’s approach to dealing with the decline in point-and-shoot camera sales with Apple’s approach to the decline in iPod sales. Apple is skating to where the puck is heading; Sony is skating to where the puck is at the moment. Apple executives have long been on the record that the company is OK with iPod sales being cannibalized by smartphones — so long as they are Apple’s own smartphones. That’s worked out well for Apple, because the iPhone is now far more popular and profitable than the iPod ever was. They didn’t hesitate in 2007 to make the first iPhone, in Steve Jobs’s own words, “the best iPod ever” too.

Sony makes camera phones, too. But their phones are not as popular as their cameras were. (Could be worse. Consider, say, Canon and Nikon, whose point-and-shoot camera sales are in decline but neither of which even make smartphones.) Sony should no more abandon the point-and-shoot camera market than Apple should abandon the music-playing iPod market, but Sony has to recognize that it’s a business in decline and that the future is in putting better cameras into phones.

The funny thing isn’t that these Curebit guys shamelessly ripped off webpage designs from 37signals, but that they did it in such a stupid way. How did they not think they were going to be caught and come out of this looking foolish at best, dishonest at worst?

MacDailyNews calls foul on Seeking Alpha writer Cameron Kaine’s claim, regarding Amazon as a rival to Apple, that “last November the company launched an assault on Apple’s tablet reign with the unveiling of its Kindle Fire to rave reviews.”

As I write this blog post, The Jackpot is No. 68 on Amazon’s Paid Bestseller list.

CUE FLASHBACK SOUND FROM LOST

One week ago, my book was dead in the water. And I mean dead. After a promising start last summer, sales crashed, completely, totally and spectacularly, despite wonderful reviews (from people who didn’t even know me!). From December 1 through January 24, I sold 21 copies on Amazon. One on BN.com. And that was it. Barely enough to fund a lunch date for me and my wife. The previous couple months hadn’t been much better. To be honest, I was trying to forget the book even existed as I worked on my new manuscript, my internal doomsayer wondering how badly I’d effed my career with a self-publishing disaster.

Saturday, 28 January 2012

My thanks to MindNode for sponsoring this week’s DF RSS feed. MindNode is an easy-to-use mind-mapping app, available for your Mac, iPad, and iPhone. With great features like Dropbox support and Wi-Fi sharing, the different versions work together cleverly, providing you with a system for organizing your ideas and plans wherever you are.

Friday, 27 January 2012

“Apple never cared about anything other than increasing product quality and decreasing production cost,” said Li Mingqi, who until April worked in management at Foxconn Technology, one of Apple’s most important manufacturing partners. Mr. Li, who is suing Foxconn over his dismissal, helped manage the Chengdu factory where the explosion occurred.

Thursday, 26 January 2012

The reason for his bearish view of the company is that Zabitsky believes the competing Android mobile operating system from Google “will change the playing field entirely” with its latest 4.0 update, also known as Ice Cream Sandwich. He says the experience on the updated platform is on par with Apple’s iOS.

My purpose here is NOT to suggest that sales of iPhones are going to decline aggressively, even though I firmly believe AAPL products do not carry with them the competitive advantages they once did. Instead, I am suggesting that sales growth like what we have been witness to will not continue at the same rate. This stall is coming, it is closer than most people think, and what we were just witness to is likely the peak in this growth cycle.

If you’re at Macworld Expo, come see Jason Snell, Andy Ihnatko, and yours truly on stage at 4pm speaking about the state of Apple. If you’re not at Macworld Expo, shame on you, but you can watch online at Macworld.com.

Wednesday, 25 January 2012

Yes, you read that headline right: despite the fact that neither AMD nor Nvidia manufacture a product that requires a magnetic drive, both claim that the hard drive shortages that resulted from the 2011 Thailand flood disaster impacted their ability to sell graphics processors, and ultimately their bottom line. Both AMD CEO Rory Read and Nvidia CEO Jen-Hsun Huang had said last quarter that they didn’t expect any impact at all from the floods — “it’s really a non-factor,” said Huang — but Nvidia just told the world that it may have earned roughly $116 million less revenue than the company originally expected due to the hard drive shortage (as well as Tegra 2 decline), and AMD told investors that it saw “a little bit of pressure in terms of hard disk” during its earnings call today.

Sure, that’s the explanation — not that demand for Windows PCs is drying up. I’m surprised Nvidia couldn’t make up the difference with Tegra 2 chipsets that powering all those best sellers on the “non-iPad tablets” list.

The government’s case also contained potentially embarrassing
allegations that top Google executives, including co-founder Larry
Page, were told about legal problems with the drug ads.

Mr. Page, now Google’s chief executive, knew about the illicit
conduct, said Mr. Neronha, the U.S. attorney for Rhode Island who led
the multiagency federal task force that conducted the sting. “We
simply know from the documents we reviewed and witnesses we
interviewed that Larry Page knew what was going on,” he said in an
interview after the August settlement.

It doesn’t take more than a few quick glances at the screenshots and iTunes text to realize that Zynga has firmly focused their copy machines on NimbleBit’s Tiny Tower. It’s really incredibly just how blatant of a clone this is, as Zynga has gone far beyond just copying the premise of the game — they even directly lifted the restocking mechanics, elevator upgrades, UI elements, and more.

Tom Reestman on numbers from Gartner and IDC that show “PC” sales slipping but Mac sales growing:

It makes sense until you realize Apple’s (i.e., Mac) data is included in the same total to which it’s being compared. In other words, Apple’s stellar year is propping up the “PC” (i.e., non-Mac) numbers, making “PC” shipments look better than they really were. If you truly want to know how Apple did in the US on its own against “PCs”, you must subtract it from the latter’s numbers. […]

The originally reported dismal “PC” growth of -5.9% becomes an even more dismal -8.5% without Apple’s numbers propping it up. That -2.6% delta is not insignificant, it’s over 40% worse than what was reported.

Speaking of Kottke, I love this Gawker story by Adrian Chen he just linked to, about a freelance hacker who, among other things, sets up prepaid cell phone networks for criminal rings, a la The Wire:

With Martin’s system, each crewmember gets a cell phone that operates using a prepaid SIM card; they also get a two-week plastic pill organizer filled with 14 SIM cards where the pills should be. Each SIM card, loaded with $50 worth of airtime, is attached to a different phone number and stores all contacts, text messages and call histories associated with that number, like a removable hard drive. This makes a new SIM card effectively a new phone. Every morning, each crewmember swaps out his phone’s card for the card in next day’s compartment in the pill organizers. After all 14 cards are used, they start over at the first one.

Each day’s SIM is preprogrammed with the numbers for the other members’ phones for that day:

As long they all swap out their cards every day, the contacts in the phones stay in sync. (They never call anyone but each other on the phones.) Crewmembers will remind each other to “take their medicine,” Martin said.

It’s much easier to find interesting things to read and look at online than it used to be… the web is now largely filters on top of filters on top of filters. So I don’t have to sift through as much stuff as I used to. But also around the time I posted that link, I got much better at blogging. I don’t know if the 10,000 hours thing kicked in or what, but when used to take me 6-8 hours to do now takes me 2-3 hours.

Still, would it have hurt these 15.4 million new iPad 2 owners to wait a couple of months for either a better price on their own gadget or at the very least a chance to spend the same amount on something better? I’m not asking iPad buyers to “think different” as much as “think,” period.

Ron’s big day starts out with a two-page ad in major papers (above). This is his Think different moment, where he puts forth the philosophy that will guide JCPenney under his leadership.

The details will be revealed during a series of presentations today in New York. But from firsthand experience, I can testify that when Ron talks about what makes a great shopping experience, you start believing.

“Students love the tablet. I am not going to hide that from you. They will bow down and kiss your feet,” said Diane Gilbert, an English teacher at Kelly Mill Middle School in Blythewood, S.C., who’s taught with tablets in her classroom. She said that Chromebooks, though, are better when it comes to typing and to letting students publish their work the way she wants it done.

Apple, by going high school first, is applying the heat to university textbook publishers and bookstores. They are saying “Fine. If you won’t work with us, then we’ll empower a generation to change your industry for you.”

Mat Honan calls Google’s new privacy policy “the end of ‘Dont be evil’”:

In a privacy policy shift, Google announced today that it will begin tracking users universally across all its services — Gmail, Search, YouTube and more — and sharing data on user activity across all of them. So much for the Google we signed up for.

Remember that “don’t be evil” bookmarklet the other day, for improving Google web search results by eliminating the special treatment of Google Plus pages? Here’s a free Safari extension that applies it automatically.

David Heinemeier Hansson, on the satisfaction of being a long-time Mac user:

Macs were (and are) just better. Not just because they were better built or put together, but because Apple was a better company. A braver company. A company that stood for higher ideals. When compared to the empire of Microsoft and the Dells, Sonys of the time, it simply felt like they were more right.

For years, when Apple was down, they were held up as proof that making the best products didn’t matter. The Mac is better than Windows and look what happened was the refrain. You still hear it today, anytime Apple slips even a notch. Look no further than yesterday’s claim chowder of Henry Blodget. What’s satisfying about Apple’s current success is that it’s proof that you can succeed wildly by focusing first and foremost on making great products. That design does matter.

Anyone who expects Apple Inc.’s growth to rebound after sales and earnings shortfalls last quarter is “living in denial,” according to David Nelson, chief strategist at Belpointe Asset Management LLC. […]

“This is no longer a hyper-growth company,” Nelson said yesterday in a telephone interview. Apple’s products are now reaching customers who are less likely to upgrade as newer models are released, he added.

Tuesday, 24 January 2012

Transcript of Cook’s remark’s on today’s call. I point you to his remarks on iCloud:

I think Peter shared earlier the number of customers that
had signed up for iCloud, and it’s already over 85 million, so
it’s incredible that this has happened in just a few months’
period of time. We’re thrilled with it, and the response from
customers has been incredible. It’s solved a lot of problems that
customers were having and made their lives much much easier…. It
was a fundamental shift recognizing that people had numerous
devices and they wanted the bulk of their content in the cloud and
easily accessible from all of their devices, and you know, I think
we’re seeing the response from that. With 85 million customers in
just three months, it is a very very important part — it’s not
just a product, it’s a strategy for the next decade.

I saw Matt Deatherage from MacJournals flag this remark during Macworld’s live coverage of the call. iCloud is as central to Apple’s next 10 years as the digital hub strategy was to the previous 10 years — and financial analysts are likely to ignore it, just like they did Apple’s digital hub strategy. I think Steve Jobs had his fingers in as many projects as he could manage in his final year, but it’s no coincidence that his last product announcement was iCloud. Put another way, I don’t expect any new Apple products that aren’t related in some way to iCloud.

Apple is a great company with wonderful products, but its run is up. It seems to me that innovation is beginning to run dry, and the stock price is overinflated. The stock has begun to fall already dropping from its $426 high. If the economy does not pick up and the company does not cushion its freefall, we could see new lows into 2012 — maybe $85. Whatever the case, I see a rocky future and a new bubble about to burst. My recommendation: Sell.

Tim Cook, as quoted in Macworld’s live transcript of Apple’s quarterly earnings call:

Last year was supposed to be the year of the tablet, and I think
most people would agree it was the year of the iPad for the
second year in a row. We’re going to continue to innovate like
crazy in this area, and continue to compete with anyone that is
currently shipping tablets, or that might enter in the future.

The iPhone is by far Apple’s biggest source of revenue and profit today. But if you’re thinking about future growth, keep in mind that the iPad is far ahead of where the iPhone was two years after its debut.

Also worth noting: Tim Cook says Apple sold 2.8 million Apple TVs in fiscal year 2011, and broke a record with 1.4 million in the just-ended quarter. They’re still calling it a hobby, and it’s only a $100 product, but in terms of units, it used to be that 1.4 million was a great number for Mac sales in a quarter.

Importantly, it’s not a question of which platform is “better.”
(This is irrelevant.) It’s a question of which platform everyone
else uses. And increasingly, in the smartphone market, barring a
radical change in trend, that’s Android.

So that’s why Android’s gains matter. And, yes, Apple fans should
be scared to death about them.

Actual result: Apple sold more iPhones in calendar 2011 than in 2007, 2008, 2009, and 2010 combined; 55 percent of all smartphones sold by Verizon last quarter were iPhones.

Marketing brainiac Mohan Sawhney, after the introduction of the original iPad two years ago:

What’s the outlook for the iPad? There will be long lines on the
day it becomes available, because a million or so die-hard Apple
fanatics will buy anything Apple puts out, even if it is a brick.
Seduction and lust is a powerful emotion and it will drive sales
for a while. Once the early adopters have forked over their money,
the rest of us will start to ask difficult and inconvenient
questions about the value relative to the price. And Apple will be
forced to make some drastic adjustments to the pricing and the
connectivity fees.

Actual result: 15 million iPads sold last quarter; same prices, same connectivity fees as when it debuted.

Demand for Apple’s iPad tablet is said to be in decline as
competition finally heats up thanks to the $199 Kindle Fire from
Amazon, and investors could be in for a disappointing fourth
quarter as a result. In a recent research note, Goldman Sachs
analyst Bill Shope suggested Apple’s firm grip on the global
tablet market may finally loosen unless the Cupertino,
California-based company lowers its pricing.

In 2009, Apple sold more iPhones than it did in 2007 and 2008
combined. In 2010, Apple sold more iPhones than it did in 2007,
2008, and 2009 combined. Last year, Apple sold 93.1 million
iPhones, slightly more than it did in in 2007, 2008, 2009, and
2010 combined. The pattern continued.

Imagine if that holds true for 2012 as well.

Richman also makes a strong case that Apple sold more iOS devices than all Android devices combined last quarter.

The Company posted record quarterly revenue of $46.33 billion and
record quarterly net profit of $13.06 billion, or $13.87 per
diluted share. These results compare to revenue of $26.74 billion
and net quarterly profit of $6 billion, or $6.43 per diluted
share, in the year-ago quarter. Gross margin was 44.7 percent
compared to 38.5 percent in the year-ago quarter. International
sales accounted for 58 percent of the quarter’s revenue.

The Company sold 37.04 million iPhones in the quarter,
representing 128 percent unit growth over the year-ago quarter.
Apple sold 15.43 million iPads during the quarter, a 111 percent
unit increase over the year-ago quarter. The Company sold 5.2
million Macs during the quarter, a 26 percent unit increase over
the year-ago quarter.

Posada sat at a dais flanked by his wife and his children, Jorge
Jr. and Paulina. To his right were the five world championship
trophies that Posada helped the Yankees win. Jeter, closer Mariano
Rivera, ace CC Sabathia and Yankees owner Hal Steinbrenner were
among those in attendance.

After Posada finished his opening statement, Diana Munson, the
widow of Yankees great Thurman Munson, spoke. She credited Posada
for inspiring her to watch baseball again. Posada had considered
Thurman Munson, who died in 1979 when the plane he was piloting
crashed in Ohio, a hero.

Diana Munson said she now has loved two Yankees catchers in
her life.

One of the all-time greats, a class act, and one of the most emotional players I’ve ever seen.

In the first quarter that Verizon Wireless was on board with Apple
for an iPhone launch event, the company sold 4.2 million iPhones,
accounting for more than half of the 7.7 million smartphones that
its customers purchased in the fourth quarter.

Here’s what Larry Page said in his Playboy interview before the
company went public: “Most portals show their own content above
content elsewhere on the web. We feel that’s a conflict of
interest, analogous to taking money for search results. Their
search engine doesn’t necessarily provide the best results; it
provides the portal’s results. Google conscientiously tries to
stay away from that. We want to get you out of Google and to the
right place as fast as possible. It’s a very different model.”

I’m going to go ahead and make a prediction: this does not end
well for Google. I’m not saying Google falls as a result of this
mistake — that would be foolish, they’re too big to fail anytime
soon — but I do think that over an extended period of time,
whether users consciously realize it or not, they’ll start looking
elsewhere for their information needs because Google has strayed
from their foundation.

It’s a philosophical line they never should’ve crossed. What made Google Google is that their web search results were better than anyone else’s, and were ordered simply by their best guess as to relevancy. Even when they introduced ads, they did it in a way that was true to the same spirit: the ads most relevant to the search terms. They profit handsomely and deservedly from this.

I think their decision to artificially promote Google Plus pages above more relevant pages on competing social networks is the modern-day equivalent of the ’90s era search engines turning their homepages into “portals”. A search engine should be designed to send users quickly and accurately away to whatever sites on the Internet they’re looking for. The ’90s-era search engine portals blew this, because the whole portal idea was to keep users on their sites rather than send them away. This Google Plus integration is the same thing — an attempt to keep users on Google.com for another page view or two.

HOME AND STUDENT SOFTWARE. For software marked “Home and Student”
edition, you may install one copy of the software on up to three
licensed devices in your household for use by people for whom that
is their primary residence. The software may not be used for
commercial, non-profit, or revenue-generating activities.

I’m pretty sure Adobe has similar terms for the educational versions of their design apps. It’s not exactly analogous to Apple’s iBooks Author terms, because Microsoft and Adobe allows full free commercial use upon buying the full-priced editions of their apps. Apple has no commercial edition of iBooks Author. Adobe and Microsoft want you to buy their software; Apple wants you to sell your book through iBookstore.

Update: Via Twitter, several DF readers report that Adobe’s educational license (see section 16.3) does not place any restrictions on commercial use.

Update 2: Looks like I was right the first time. Also via Twitter, Weldon Dodd points to Adobe’s EULA web page, which states in Section 3(f), under “License Restrictions”:

(f) Education Versions may not be used for, or distributed to any
party for, any commercial purpose.

Likewise, if you deliver a speech in PowerPoint, we promise not
to take 30% of your speaking fees.

If you manage your finances in Excel, we promise not to take
30% of your income.

OK, but none of these things are true for users of Pages, Keynote, or Numbers. iBooks Author is not a new e-book editing component of the iWorks suite, regardless how many people wish that it were. It is a dedicated front-end to the iBookstore.

The only fair comparison would be to the licensing requirements of the e-book editing and layout app for Microsoft’s e-book store, neither of which exist. Microsoft could make a lot of friends if they released a free editing tool as polished as iBooks Author which places no restrictions upon its output. I’m not going to hold my breath on that.

(The fact that Shaw is able to even attempt to make hay on this point is yet another reason that I still consider it a mistake for Apple to assert the blanket “if you sell it, you must sell it through us” restriction.)

Even if we’re right and Apple doesn’t care about PDFs or plain
text files, that’s still the Apple of today. The Apple of 20
years from now might turn out to be a completely different
company, and this EULA has no expiration date. That’s a dangerous
situation for authors and publishers who care about long-term
distribution rights. It would be best for Apple to clarify the
terms now — and, I hope, loosen them — rather than prolong the
uncertainty.

Daniel Steinberg compares Apple’s iBooks Author EULA to the terms and conditions of a traditional publishers contract for authors:

I’ve been told by a publisher that they want a second edition of
one of my books. Their conditions on me are that I drop this
series of ebooks I’m working on because it might compete with the
title. When I said no they responded that that’s ok they’ll just
get someone else to revise my book.

My book.

It’s not really mine. Even though the copyright is in my name,
that turns out not to mean very much.

So am I bothered by the iBooks Author EULA? No. But maybe that’s
because I’ve been signing contracts with traditional publishers
for so long.

Yeah, but that only applies to .ibooks files. You can also export
.pdf and .txt and those are unrestricted.

Not true. The license defines “Work” as “any book or other work
you generate using this software.” That definitely includes PDF
and plain text, and it could be construed to include the very
words you type in. So if you use iBooks Author to write your
novel, you might be legally barred from ever selling that novel in
any format, not just as an iBook.

I think this is a gross misinterpretation of Apple’s license. I’m willing to bet cold hard cash that Apple has no intention to and never will try to stop a publisher or author from taking content written in iBooks Author and publishing it elsewhere in another format. No one will ever hear from Apple after exporting from iBooks Author to text or PDF.

But I think the license is crummily written, because it’s not precisely clear what Apple is saying. If Apple wants to make bold and far-reaching licensing restrictions, they should express them clearly and succinctly. Whereas I think, much like with the App Store, their lawyers seek to express the legal restrictions in terms far broader than what they actually seek to enforce. I’m willing to make the above bet based on my understanding of the company and the way Apple thinks, not the language of the EULA. (Although I do think the key word in the EULA’s definition of “work” is generate. I say it’s the .ibooks file you generate using iBooks Author upon which Apple is asserting restrictions.)

Baldur Bjarnason has a detailed look at Apple’s proprietary extensions in the new iBooks format:

As far as I can tell, after putting together a sample book with
most of these widgets and then inspecting that book’s code in
BBEdit, none of these widgets use javascript in any way. I
couldn’t find a single line of javascript in anywhere in the
ebook’s files.

Why is this important? Because javascript is the only
cross-platform and standard method for delivering interactivity in
hypertext files, such as HTML or ePub. The way Apple has
implemented these interactive widgets is through object tags with
custom types and data attributes. The type tells iBooks what sort
of widget it is and the data attributes give it the parameters.
The code to do this are iBooks-only extensions to the webkit
rendering engine they are using.

This makes me think that the licensing restriction claiming you may only sell the output of iBooks author through Apple is really just about preventing you from circumventing the iTunes Store and selling directly to iPad users. I think I was wrong about Apple being concerned about iBooks Author being used to produce content for competing e-book platforms — I don’t see how they could parse any of this multimedia widget stuff without an awful lot of reverse engineering.

Do they need a licensing restriction to enforce this? Why not run the iBookstore the way they’re running the Mac App Store? The fact that Mac apps can be sold directly doesn’t seem to be slowing the growth of the Mac App Store.

Daring Fireball posted a long reply to my article, but I
think John Gruber just did not get my point: Apple started
thinking about the features probably beginning of 2010 or even
earlier. They started implementing the features second half of
2010. The standardization could have started on their proposals at
beginning of 2010, and stabilize around them beginning of 2011. It
means we could have obtained a Candidate Recommendation for these
features in the course of 2011 and then Apple would be shipping
today an application with a clear competitive advantage — being
the only one on the market — conformant to future standards.

I think I understood Glazman’s point. What Glazman doesn’t seem to understand is that Apple had no interest in publicly sharing its specific plans for interactive book design two years ago. The new iBooks 2.0 and iBooks author are a typical Apple product — developed in secret, announced when ready.

On the contrary, Apple has implemented features that are now
partly or largely incompatible with the future standards, and I am
saying this is yet another burden on the Publishing industry that
is fighting with already too many formats and too many bad quality
conversions.

No argument there. But again, Apple’s not in this game to reduce the cross-platform burdens of the publishing industry. If the publishing industry wants to reduce the number of formats it supports and the hassles of converting from one format to another, Apple’s pitch would be to go exclusive to the iBookstore. This is another case of people acting surprised and/or disappointed that Apple, a for-profit company, is acting like a for-profit company.

Despite intensifying competition and the loss of some high-profile licensees, the usage of Microsoft Corp.’s Windows Mobile operating system in smart phones will nearly triple from 2009 to 2013, allowing it to reclaim the No.-2 position in the global market, according to iSuppli Corp.

In 2013, 67.9 million smart phones will use the Windows Mobile operating system, up from 27.7 million in 2009. This will give Windows Mobile a 15.3 percent share of the global market in 2013, second only to the Symbian operating system, which will control 47.6 percent.

After 20 years together at the helm of Research In Motion Ltd., Jim Balsillie and Mike Lazaridis, the company’s co-chief executives, said they planned to turn over the top job early Monday to a little-known company insider as part of a board and management shuffle.

Fascinating well-researched investigative report by Charles Duhigg and Keith Bradsher for the New York Times, on the rise of China as a manufacturing power and the corresponding effect on middle class jobs in the U.S., with Apple as the case study. Includes this heretofore unknown (to me, at least) story on the original iPhone’s last-minute change from a plastic to glass display:

In 2007, a little over a month before the iPhone was scheduled to
appear in stores, Mr. Jobs beckoned a handful of lieutenants into
an office. For weeks, he had been carrying a prototype of the
device in his pocket.

Mr. Jobs angrily held up his iPhone, angling it so everyone could
see the dozens of tiny scratches marring its plastic screen,
according to someone who attended the meeting. He then pulled his
keys from his jeans.

People will carry this phone in their pocket, he said. People also
carry their keys in their pocket. “I won’t sell a product that
gets scratched,” he said tensely. The only solution was using
unscratchable glass instead. “I want a glass screen, and I want it
perfect in six weeks.”

After one executive left that meeting, he booked a flight to
Shenzhen, China. If Mr. Jobs wanted perfect, there was nowhere
else to go.

The Times has quotes from former and present (unnamed in the latter case, of course) executives who all paint the same picture: that Chinese manufacturing isn’t merely cheaper, but also perhaps even more importantly, nimbler, more flexible, and faster:

“They could hire 3,000 people overnight,” said Jennifer Rigoni,
who was Apple’s worldwide supply demand manager until 2010, but
declined to discuss specifics of her work. “What U.S. plant can
find 3,000 people overnight and convince them to live in dorms?”

The main reason we want to fund such startups is not to protect the world from more SOPAs, but because SOPA brought it to our attention that Hollywood is dying. They must be dying if they’re resorting to such tactics. If movies and TV were growing rapidly, that growth would take up all their attention. When a striker is fouled in the penalty area, he doesn’t stop as long as he still has control of the ball; it’s only when he’s beaten that he turns to appeal to the ref. SOPA shows Hollywood is beaten. And yet the audiences to be captured from movies and TV are still huge. There is a lot of potential energy to be liberated there.

Huge opportunity here. Forms of entertainment evolve and sometimes die, but the aggregate demand for entertainment is ever-growing.

Friday, 20 January 2012

My thanks to Bare Bones Software for sponsoring this week’s DF RSS feed to promote BBEdit 10, the newest version of the preeminent HTML and text editor for the Mac. I’ve used BBEdit every single day I’ve worked on a Mac since 1992. I expect to continue using it every day for the next 20 years, too.

BBEdit 10 has more than 100 new features. Download the demo and see for yourself.

On the heels of Apple’s e-textbook announcement in New York City
this week, publisher Houghton Mifflin Harcourt announced the
results of its “HMC Fuse: Algebra I” pilot program at Ameila
Earhart Middle School in California’s Riverside Unified School
District. The Algebra I digital textbook is touted as the world’s
first full-curriculum algebra application developed exclusively
for Apple’s iPad.

In its test run, the “HMH Fuse” application helped more than 78
percent of students score “Proficient” or “Advanced” on the spring
2011 California Standards Test. That was significantly higher than
the 59 percent of peers who used traditional textbooks.

It would be pretty cool if digital textbooks aren’t just cheaper and more portable, but are actually more effective.

According to an unverified report from a source who worked with
Push Pop Press co-founder Mike Matas, Jobs met with the fledgling
company and warned Matas that if he pursued building dynamic
books targeted at the App Store he would risk intellectual
property claims.

Matas, a former designer at Apple, reportedly used a variety of
patented technologies developed at Apple to deliver his plans for
Push Pop Press. His company intended to give publishers a way to
develop smoothly interactive titles that blurred the line between
book and app.

The story I’ve heard is a little different, and a lot less dramatic. What a well-informed little birdie told me is that it wasn’t a legal threat over patents or technology, but rather something more like Panic’s classic story about iTunes and Audion (or maybe you more like Jobs’s hint regarding the then-upcoming iPhoto at the end of that tale). I.e. that Jobs more or less warned Push Pop Press that Apple was going in the same direction, in a big way. A competitive warning, not a legal threat.

Excellent update from The Iconfactory to this essential tool for designers and nitpickers. Lots of great new features, like mirroring a window on your Mac to an iPhone or iPad display, and simulating vision defects (e.g. colorblindness).

Dov Frankel, explaining something that confused me during the week’s episode of The Talk Show:

Basically, the iPhone has two different volume levels: your ringer
volume, and your audio playback volume. When audio is playing, or
when an audio-centric app is open, the hardware volume buttons
change the volume of the audio. When at the home screen with no
audio playing, the volume buttons change the ringer volume. The
audio level can go to 0, but the ringer volume can only go to 1.
To turn the ringer off, you have to use the hardware switch.

Thursday, 19 January 2012

For best results with iPad, use the Format bar to select fonts;
the Format bar’s font list includes only fonts that are available
on the iPad, so the book should look the same in iBooks Author and
in iBooks on the iPad. If you use the Fonts window to select your
fonts, all fonts available on your computer will be listed.
Selecting a font that is unavailable on the iPad may have
inconsistent results when you view the book in iBooks.

Regular books from the iBookstore support embedded custom fonts, so this is a little disappointing. Hopefully it’s just a didn’t-get-around-to-it-yet 1.0 limitation.

If I create a textbook using iBooks Author and then decide to made
it freely available to the world (à la Khan Academy) I can
do that without any restriction. Simple click ‘Export’ within
iBook Author and the resulting file can be distributed by any
means I choose and then loaded in iBooks. The mind boggles at what
things may come out of this.

All Apple is doing with this restriction is saying that if you
directly profit from this free tool and platform that we have
created, then we deserve our cut. Which seems entirely fair to me.

I’ve been pondering this, and I’m thinking Apple’s perspective is about two things. First, it’s about Smith’s argument above. You don’t get to use this free tool to produce books that you sell directly to customers, circumventing Apple’s store. Think about the textbook business, where a publisher might sell thousands of copies of the same book to each school district. This isn’t just about selling iPads — Apple wants its 30 percent.

Second, it’s about not wanting iBooks Author to serve as an authoring tool for competing bookstores like Amazon’s or Google’s. The output of iBooks Author is, as far as I can tell, HTML5 — pretty much ePub 3 with whatever nonstandard liberties Apple saw fit to take in order to achieve the results they wanted. It’s not a standard format in the sense of following a spec from a standards body like the W3C, but it’s just HTML5 rendered by WebKit — not a binary blob tied to iOS or Cocoa. It may not be easy, but I don’t think it would be that much work for anyone else with an ePub reader that’s based on WebKit to add support for these iBooks textbooks. Apple is saying, “Fuck that, unless you’re giving it away for free.”

With these licensing restrictions, Apple is attempting to get the lock-in benefits of a proprietary file format without the proprietary file format.

Apple, in this EULA, is claiming a right not just to its software,
but to its software’s output. It’s akin to Microsoft trying
to restrict what people can do with Word documents, or Adobe
declaring that if you use Photoshop to export a JPEG, you can’t
freely sell it to Getty. As far as I know, in the consumer
software industry, this practice is unprecedented.

This is Apple at its worst. Let’s hope this is just the work of an overzealous lawyer, and not their actual intention.

As a closing thought, I’ve had this idea in my head for the last few years of what a perfect news site looks like, and it’s quite simple: a white screen with a list of 5 or 10 links that changes once a day. That’s it. Here’s the tricky part though: the 5 or 10 links need to be THE 5 or 10 links that are most useful to me on any given day.

We’ll know shortly. As I mentioned yesterday, the key thing to watch at the Guggenheim is whether Cue brings up reps from the big textbook publishers like Pearson and McGraw-Hill onstage, or whether the focus is on letting educators and others build their own books, so they can bypass both the publishers and the antiquated textbook procurement system.

Ends up it was both. And I think both efforts revolve around iBooks Author.

I’ve said this before but I do believe that Apple is trying to deliver more of an appliance experience, whereas Google is providing you with a modern take on a traditional computing experience. If the appliance is a smartphone, then both approaches are equally capable — it’s just a matter of personal preference. […]

ICS is smoother, more polished and has its own set of new features that make it a significant step forward for Android. What ICS is not however is an outright clone of iOS. If you prefer the iOS experience to Android, ICS will do nothing to change your opinion. If all you were missing from Android was a smoother UI, then its fourth major release should be almost everything you could ask for.

I agree wholeheartedly. ICS is the first release of Android that feels like a true major upgrade. It hasn’t been changed so much as it’s been polished and refined.

Sony Ericsson calculates its own Android market share at 10% in volume and 7% in value during Q4. In the past, Sony Ericsson has always talked about aiming to be the number one Android vendor, however, there [were] no such targets mentioned in this morning’s conference call. Perhaps, these targets are being reassessed by Sony following the acquisition of the Sony Ericsson joint venture.

Perhaps.

Wednesday, 18 January 2012

Fascinating email to Sarah Lacy from a book publishing insider, on Amazon’s upheaval of the industry.

It’s occurred to me that Apple’s stunning successes over the last decade could be a hindrance to its ongoing negotiations with content companies — movie studios, TV networks, book publishers, etc. Imagine a weekly poker game where, week after week, the same player wins. Every goddamn week. Pretty soon that player is going to stop being invited to play. That’s Apple.

Apple’s opportunity with books is that there’s already a dominant money-winning bully at the table: Amazon.

In the design world, there’s a well-known swin­dle where a pres­ti­gious but stingy client says “I wish I could pay you, but I don’t have the bud­get. How about you let me use your work for free? I know it’ll be great expo­sure for you, and lead to pay­ing work.” In truth, it’s not, and it won’t. Designer Jes­sica His­che aptly calls this “the most toxic line of bull­shit any­one will ever feed you.” Why? Because it’s just good-natured grift­ing, an exploita­tion of the weaker by the stronger. Nev­er­the­less, it works, because there will always be design­ers hun­gry enough to believe that they don’t have other choices.

Google Web Fonts uses a vari­a­tion of this toxic line as part of its pitch to poten­tial open-source font con­trib­u­tors.

While the iPad’s lead in the tablet market is obvious, it’s becoming more clear there’s strong competition for market share below it. The Amazon Kindle Fire represented an average of 2.4 ad impressions on Chitikas network for every 100 iPad impressions, but RIM’s BlackBerry PlayBook wasn’t far behind; it viewed an average of 1.8 ad impressions for every 100 iPad impressions on Chitika’s mobile ad network. That’s followed closely by the Samsung Galaxy with 1.6 ad impressions and the Motorola XOOM with 1.55 add impressions.

Impressions per hundred iPad impressions? What a great metric for the “non-iPad tablet” category.

I saw Ben Brooks recommend this iPhone/iPad calendaring app the other day, and I figured it was worth a shot, since I’ve never really been satisfied with Apple’s built-in calendar app. Glad I did, because Agenda is really neat. Thoughtful, clean, useful layout. The name “Agenda” really captures the appeal — the presentation is all about what you have scheduled today and over the next few days.

Plus, amazingly, it’s only $.99. With the trend toward free apps that either badger you up for in-app upgrades or take up useful screen space with advertising (or both) I’ve actually gotten to the point where I’m more willing to try a $.99 app than a free one.

In the case of Apple, this is happening in front of our eyes, and
the risks are therefore very high. Apple has stopped serving their
customers well, and unless they start to serve their customers
better the company will begin to lose more market share and
revenue and earnings projections will come down aggressively.

Most people think Apple’s customers are the end user, but because
Apple relies so heavily on third-party resellers like Verizon and
Sprint, both of which are feeling margin contraction and negative
effects on earnings because of the extremely high cost of iPhones,
the real customers are third-party resellers, and Apple is not
treating them right. As long as margins and earnings are
negatively affected by sales of Apple’s products, those resellers
will look for alternatives and eventually they will find them.
Nothing could be clearer.

Let me get this straight. Apple entered the phone business five years ago with a strategy completely different than any other handset maker: treating the user as the customer, rather than the carriers. With this strategy, Apple has now captured two-thirds of the profit in the worldwide handset market. And but now, according to Kee, what Apple should do is start acting like all the other handset makers.

Where do they find these guys?

Tuesday, 17 January 2012

Fascinating data visualizations, as usual, from Horace Dediu. Be sure to watch the video — that’s my favorite of the bunch. Dediu:

This last view corresponds to the data in the first graph (line
chart). If iOS and Android are added as potential substitutions
for personal computing, the share of PCs suddenly collapses to
less than 50%. It also suggests much more collapse to come.

I will concede that this last view is extremist. It does not
reflect a competition that exists in real life. However, I put
this data together to show a historic pattern. Sometimes extremism
is a better point of view than conservatism.

The graph in question — extreme though Dediu admits it is — should be terrifying to Microsoft and its shareholders. Maybe Intel too.

Ultimately, the users become the product, not the app. Selling
users to advertisers and pushing in-app upgrades/consumables is a
completely different game than carefully crafting apps to maximize
user value/entertainment. It’d be a shame if the mobile software
industry devolved into some horrific hybrid of Zynga and Facebook.

Looks like the rollout isn’t exactly smooth, though. (Among iTunes’s numerous deficiencies, what’s the deal with the continued use of cryptic numeric “error codes”? Error messages like this seem like a remnant from the ’90s.)

Word quickly spread that Stanley had a computerized system to
track theaters and grosses based on technical information he had
acquired while developing HAL 9000, the all-knowing computer in
2001. For months these stories persisted in the trades as the
roster of Clockwork cinemas was refined. They were neither
confirmed nor denied.

Preliminary results show users from Google IP address ranges in
India deleting, moving and abusing OSM data including subtle edits
like reversing one-way streets. Two OpenStreetMap accounts have
been vandalizing
OSM
in London, New York and elsewhere from Google’s IP address, the
same address in India reported by Mocality.

(Via Kontra, who observes that 2012 has been a rather scandal-heavy year for Google, and we’re only three weeks in.)

Google sent the following statement to ReadWriteWeb on Tuesday
morning. “The two people who made these changes were contractors
acting on their own behalf while on the Google network. They are
no longer working on Google projects.”

Monday, 16 January 2012

This is why Windows Phone 7 is screwed. It needs apps. And to get
apps, it has to compete for developer time and money with
platforms that make money, either directly or by advertising. It
has nothing to do with the carrier system. It has nothing to do
with marketing. You have to convince developers to: Install
Windows (which they won’t do), learn the Windows dev tools (which
they won’t do), and then release on the Windows store, where it
won’t make any money, because there’s no customers.

Put another way, the good news for Windows Phone 7 is that a platform doesn’t need the most apps merely to compete. The bad news is that a platform does need enough good apps and enough good developers — and ideally, some excellent titles exclusive to the platform — and Windows Phone doesn’t seem to have any of those things.

I also suspect, like Hughes, that it’s a big problem for Microsoft that developers need to use Windows to develop for Windows Phone. Sure, a majority of all “programmers” in the world may well still be using Windows, but because of iOS, an overwhelming majority of the best mobile app programmers in the world are on Mac OS X.

A number of critics have highlighted flaws in Microsoft’s
mobile strategy, some pointing to the number of apps available.
Robert Scoble has been the most vocal recently, arguing that
Windows Phone is missing 450,000 apps, and developers aren’t
interested in focusing their resources on building apps for the
platform. Business Insider responded and pointed to Windows
Phone’s 50,000 apps, compared to iOS’ 500,000 and Android’s
400,000, noting that Windows Phone reached the 50K milestone
faster than iOS and Android. The numbers game is irrelevant for
the majority of smartphone users, they simply want “cool” apps,
and ones that their friends have — something that Windows
Phone lacks right now.

I’ve said this several times before, but quantity-of-apps is a terrible primary metric for the appeal of a platform. If the quantity of app titles were all that mattered, we’d all be using Windows, not Mac OS X, right? Having the most apps matters, but having the best apps matters too. The sweet spot for a platform is to do well in both regards.

Think about something like the Nintendo DS. If quantity were all that mattered, no one would buy the DS instead of something like the iPod Touch. The DS is popular not because of the quantity of titles, but because of the quality of the titles it does have.

Apple is slated to announce the fruits of its labor on improving
the use of technology in education at its special media event on
Thursday, January 19. While speculation has so far centered on
digital textbooks, sources close to the matter have confirmed to
Ars that Apple will announce tools to help create interactive
e-books — the “GarageBand for e-books,” so to speak — and expand
its current platform to distribute them to iPhone and iPad users.

Never underestimate the importance of good authoring tools. A good “GarageBand for e-books” could do for the iBooks platform what Xcode and the Cocoa Touch frameworks have done for the App Store.

Sensitivity to moisture is a glaring shortcoming of today’s gadgetry. I have no idea whether this company’s technology is the real deal, but it’s inevitable that sooner or later waterproofing will become de rigueur.

Paul Carr, writing for the just-launched PandoDaily, which is to TechCrunch as The Verge is to Engadget:

In any case, the launch of PandoDaily (are we calling it just
‘Pando’ yet? ‘PD?’) is proof of the old maxim that everything
happens for a reason. Without all the unpleasantness, how else
could I have the unmitigated pleasure of working with my old
friends Sarah, Mike and MG — plus a bunch of new ones — on a
splendid new enterprise, free from the yoke of corporate
ownership?

Gee, that’s a real head-scratcher. Wait, I’ve got it: how about if Mike Arrington had never sold TechCrunch to AOL in the first place?

Samsung Electronics Co. said on Tuesday it planned to merge its
‘Bada’ mobile software with a platform backed by chipmaker
Intel Corp in its latest push to diversify away from Google’s
Android. […]

In September two Linux software groups, one backed by Samsung, and
another by Intel, agreed to jointly develop Tizen, a new operating
system for cellphones and other devices, by merging their LiMo and
Meego platforms in a bid to gain wider industry and consumer
support. “We have an effort that will merge Bada and Tizen,” a
Samsung spokesman confirmed senior vice president Kang Tae-jin as
telling Forbes magazine in an interview last week.

Sure, that’ll work. Just take them and smoosh them together. It’s easy to merge operating systems.

Steven Wittens describes the technology and thinking behind his new site design, which features a 3D header and no images. WebKit only for now, but it works on the iPad, too. Alas, as a consequence of the way he built it, you lose momentum scrolling. Worth trying it out on the iPad just to see how essential momentum scrolling is to the touch experience.

Nat Torkington on President Obama’s request for the tech community to find some other anti-piracy technology as an alternative to SOPA:

Take the truck, the boat, the helicopter, that we’ve sent you.
Don’t wait for the time machine, because we’re never going to
invent something that returns you to 1965 when copying was hard
and you could treat the customer’s convenience with contempt.

Again, I mention this entire project not to single out the
creators as bad people but instead to show any and all
past/current/future Kickstarter backers what not to do. When you
are designing a product for Kickstarter and you show prototypes,
backers will assume you have worked all the bugs out first. When
things start to go wrong, it doesn’t help to discount the comments
or question the motivation of backers giving critical feedback.

Speaking of reviews of Android from the perspective of expert users accustomed to other OSes, Alan Zeino has a terrifically-detailed scathing critique of Ice Cream Sandwich:

I’ve spent seven days with my Galaxy Nexus and I still find it
hard to believe that Google ships a mobile operating system with
such a broken navigation system, centered around that one back
button. Let’s begin with the downright obscene. The back button
never, ever tells you if you’ve gone ‘back’ as far as you can go.
Tap on that button ad infinitum until every screen/app in the
device’s history disappears and you’ll find yourself at the home
screen. But the back button will not dim, nor will it disable.
You can tap on it to your heart’s content, and you won’t move
(though your device will vibrate and chime). The same applies for
the home button, which surprisingly doesn’t dim when you’re
already ‘home’ either.

This to me is the biggest mystery regarding Ice Cream Sandwich and the Galaxy Nexus. Why replace the system hardware buttons with touchscreen software buttons but not make the new software buttons contextually aware or contextually indicative in any way? They’ve replaced dumb hardware buttons with equally dumb software buttons. It’s endlessly frustrating for me as an iPhone user accustomed to on-screen back buttons that tell me exactly where I’ll be going back to.

Speaking of Charlie Kindel, I’ve been meaning to link to his review last month of the Samsung Galaxy S II. He’s approaching from the perspective of a Windows Phone user, and it’s interesting — but perhaps not surprising — how many of his severe complaints mirror those of iPhone users trying Android.

You might say it’s unfair to review a phone running Android 2.3, but that’s the version of Android running on the overwhelming majority of Android phones available for sale today. The truth is that Ice Cream Sandwich — which I believe is the first truly significant improvement to Android since it debuted — is effectively a preview of next year’s Android for the mass market.

Remember that spectacular “What if we count the iPad as a computer?” market share graph from a Deutsche Bank analyst last week? Sebastian Peitsch identified some serious problems with the methodology used to create it, and did the hard work to do this graph correctly.

I wonder if Microsoft has ever done a study to see how many people switched from Windows to Mac because of all the shovelware and malware that was inundating Windows? I bet it was a lot of people. I promise you that’s why I switched. I don’t think the Mac is any easier to use. Except there are no viruses. My Windows machine was impossible to use because of all the crap.

Google is now in the same place. Enough is enough. Is anyone going to step up and take advantage of their mistake?

I’ve recently been using DuckDuckGo for many web searches, and I’ve been pleased with the accuracy and presentation of the results. My biggest beef is that DuckDuckGo feels a little slow compared to Google (whose web search results are famously optimized to return as close to instantaneously as is technically possible).

Search, in short, should appear to be like Caesar’s wife, above reproach. When using its algorithmic wizardry to deeply integrate social information into its search experience, it behooves Google to avoid even a whiff of bias. With SPYW, though, the odor is unmistakable. No matter how you cut it, the search engine now increases the value of participating in Google+. It may be Google’s right to do this. But it also may turn off a lot of users. And it also provides ammo for Google’s detractors, including those in Washington.

I see two risks in this regard. First, the trust issue that Levy outlines above. Second, visually, their results now look more cluttered.

Saturday, 14 January 2012

In the entire discussion, I’ve seen no discussion of credible evidence of this economic harm. There’s no question in my mind that piracy exists, that people around the world are enjoying creative content without paying for it, and even that some criminals are profiting by redistributing it. But is there actual economic harm?

Friday, 13 January 2012

Speaking of DF RSS feed sponsorships, a bit of last-minute rescheduling has left next week’s spot open. The schedule is generally booked weeks or even months in advance, so if you have a product or service you’d like to promote now to DF’s good-looking, wealthy, spendthrift, thrill-seeking audience, get in touch.

Update: Next week’s spot is gone. April and May remain wide open, though, for those of you planning ahead.

My thanks to Sparrow for sponsoring this week’s DF RSS feed. Sparrow is a terrific new e-mail client for Mac OS X. It’s elegant and fast, and improving quickly with frequent updates. Just one example of Sparrow’s cleverness: a new feature that lets you use Dropbox as a storage mechanism for large attachments.

At present, Microsoft has 14 retail stores and plans to open up to 75 more over the next three years, usually placing them as close as possible to Apple outlets. “Well, the traffic is going to be there, and we’ve got to beat them anyway,” Ballmer says with a shrug.

Not a bad attitude. This attitude exemplifies the best of Ballmer: he’s not afraid to try.

Apple Inc.’s next iPad, expected to go on sale in March, will sport a
high-definition screen, run a faster processor and work with
next-generation wireless networks, according to three people
familiar with the product.

Assuming this is right, it doesn’t guarantee the next iPhone will support LTE too, but it sure does make it more likely.

Speaking of market share, this graph from Deutsche Bank’s Chris Whitmore is a real eye-opener. Correlation is not causation, but if you look at this and don’t see that the iPad is disrupting the entire computer industry, you’ve got your head in the sand (or some other hole).

Since October, Google’s GKBO appears to have been systematically
accessing Mocality’s database and attempting to sell their
competing product to our business owners. They have been telling
untruths about their relationship with us, and about our business
practices, in order to do so. As of January 11th, nearly 30% of
our database has apparently been contacted.

Furthermore, they now seem to have outsourced this operation from
Kenya to India.

Copiously documented and recorded. Just jaw-dropping. Boing Boing has a brief statement from Google. My question: Is Mocality the only company Google has done this to?

What interests me much more is the by-model breakdown of sales
according to NPD. There are currently three iPhone models
available — iPhone 4S ($199), iPhone 4 ($99), and iPhone 3GS
(free) — and they occupy the top three slots in that order.
This may not be an entirely new phenomenon, particularly not for
Apple products, but I still find it remarkable. It contradicts
what most people keep insisting is conventional wisdom: that cheap
and/or free models will always steal volume from premium models.

Looking at the other phones on the top 10 list from NPD, this might be true of the phone industry overall. It looks like NPD’s list is dominated by new high-end models. Spots four and five go to the Samsung Galaxy S 4G and Galaxy S II, for example.

And it shows that despite what many Apple observers like to say,
Apple does in fact care about market share — at least for now.

It’s not that they don’t care about market share, it’s just that market share is not Apple’s top priority.

It’s hard to imagine an executive from Apple doing that regarding a legal agreement. I point this out not to pass judgment, but merely as an observation. Apple’s brand is cooler, friendlier, more consumer focused. Their executives appear onstage wearing jeans. Microsoft’s brand is more staid, more corporate focused. Their executives appear onstage wearing dress slacks. But in terms of things like using Twitter, Microsoft allows (encourages?) its executives to let it fly.

Actually, now that I think about it, I do want to pass judgment here. I like the way Microsoft allows this. This tweet from Frank Shaw is more honest, and a better reflection of how Microsoft really feels about this, than the PR. It’s an injection of real personality — a human voice rather than the corporate voice.

I understand why Apple is so tight-lipped, but it sure would be fun and revealing if, say, Phil Schiller used Twitter the way Frank Shaw does.

(On the other hand, Apple’s current use of social media like Twitter — to wit, almost not at all — is an accurate honest reflection of the company: secretive, cautious, reserved.)

“Together with our 10 previous agreements with Android and Chrome
OS device manufacturers, including HTC, Samsung and Acer, this
agreement with LG means that more than 70 percent of all Android
smartphones sold in the U.S. are now receiving coverage under
Microsoft’s patent portfolio,” said Horacio Gutierrez, corporate
vice president and deputy general counsel, Intellectual Property
Group at Microsoft.

Put another way: Microsoft continues to profit from Android. The only remaining holdout among major Android handset makers is Motorola, whom Google is attempting to acquire.

“I have spent a lot of time in factories over my lifetime and we
are clearly leading in this area,” said Mr. Cook, previously
Apple’s chief operating officer who oversaw its supply chain. “It
is like innovating in products. You can focus on things that are
barriers or you can focus on scaling the wall or redefining the
problem.”

Example:

The report also found 24 facilities conducted pregnancy tests and
56 didn’t have procedures to prevent discrimination against
pregnant workers. Apple said that at its direction, the suppliers
have stopped discriminatory screenings for medical conditions or
pregnancy.

The Fair Labor Association today announced that Apple will join
the FLA as a Participating Company, effective immediately. The FLA
will independently assess facilities in Apple’s supply chain and
report detailed findings on the FLA website. Apple becomes the
first technology company to join the Association as a
Participating Company.

Microsoft Corp. said industrywide sales of personal computers will
probably be lower than analysts had projected in the fourth
quarter because supply was hurt by flooding in Thailand.

Analysts have estimated that total PC shipments fell about 1
percent in the quarter, Tami Reller, chief financial officer of
Microsoft’s Windows unit, said at an investment conference. The
actual number is probably lower, she said. Bill Koefoed,
Microsoft’s general manager of investor relations, echoed those
remarks at a separate event.

This spin is a little too cute for my tastes. It seems like what Microsoft is trying to argue is that “PC sales” are down, and therefore Windows licensing sales are down, too. But sales of the Mac and iPad are up, not down, for the same quarter. It’s not “PC sales” that are down in the abstract, but Windows PC sales specifically.

We believe Apple may have decided not to release an LTE iPhone
last year in part because it did not want to cede any leverage to
Verizon, which had the clear lead in LTE deployment. We think
Apple preferred to see AT&T, Verizon, and Sprint all offer
essentially the same iPhone, so that it maximizes the role of the
device (rather than the network) in consumers’ purchasing
decisions.

This is not how Apple works. Apple will release an LTE iPhone when they can make one that meets Apple’s own standards for performance, battery life, price, and manufacturing scalability. It’s that simple. Tim Cook explained this a year ago, when the Verizon iPhone 4 was introduced.

The other thing that Yin’s analysis seemingly ignores is the rest of the world. Apple sells the same iPhone 4S everywhere. Verizon and AT&T do dominate the U.S. carrier market, but from a global perspective, they’re just two big carriers among dozens.

Speaking of Foxconn, Ira Glass’s This American Life included an excerpt of Mike Daisey performing his one-man show “The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs”, about his own research and findings into Apple’s factory conditions in China.

Speaking of The Talk Show, one of the topics this week was about Samsung’s design rip-offs. I mentioned that Samsung has a history of ripping off market leaders that predates the iPhone. Their 2007 BlackJack is a perfect example — even the name was shameless.

This week’s episode of America’s favorite do-it-yourself home improvement podcast. Topics include CES, Apple’s army of camera-wielding monkeys, some predictions for 2012, and a bit of speculation regarding next week’s education Apple event.

Well, here’s a test case. Let’s say you paid close attention last
year to the tablets that were hyped at the show. How important
have they turned out to be, one year on?

We broke down the trajectories of 17 tablets from CES 2011. In the
final tally, I think you could say one is a qualified success (the
Asus Eee Pad Transformer), one did OK (the Motorola XOOM), and
several flopped (Dell Streak, RIM Playbook) or made no impact
(Coby Kyrus, Cydle M7 Multipad, Naxa NID-7001). Nine never were
heard from again.

The new Google “Search Plus Your World” feature — which I’m now
simply calling “Search Plus” — has just gone live for me. Huge
debate erupted yesterday over whether it somehow favors Google+. I
can see now that it clearly does, even more than I thought. Here’s
a closer look at the changes, including how they turn Google+ into
an essential social network for any search marketer.

I give Google a lot of shit. Some think it’s justified, others
don’t. But I honestly just don’t understand what they’re doing
here. It’s like they’re suffering from brain diarrhea. They’re not
handling this situation well.

It’s one thing for Google to tightly integrate their own social network with their web search results, using their monopoly (or, if you prefer, monopsony) to give Google Plus a significant competitive advantage over Facebook and Twitter. Some see this as anticompetitive behavior; others see this as good clean competitive hardball. Are they unfairly abusing a monopoly, or fairly using their best strength to their own advantage? That’s up for debate.

But to deny that they’re doing it at all? It defies belief.

I honestly don’t know what’s worse: if Google is so institutionally delusional that they actually believe this isn’t giving Google Plus a tremendous advantage (fair or unfair) over every other social network in the world, or if Google thinks so poorly of everyone outside the company that they think anyone is actually going to buy this line of bullshit. The best case scenario for Google is that Eric Schmidt, in his new role as chairman, has turned into a loose cannon who should just shut the fuck up.

Google executive chairman Eric Schmidt says Google+ content is not
being favored over Twitter and Facebook by Google’s search engine.
Rather, those companies can be treated the same if they grant
Google the right permissions to access their content.

Does Google actually believe this? Do they expect anyone else to believe this? Serious questions. I don’t understand why they would say this.

We also talked about OEMs’ perennial press to skin the operating
system — a trend that looks poised to continue in Android 4.0 —
which developed into a full-blown conversation about the conflict
between the mythical “stock Android device” and the realities of
business between manufacturers like Motorola and carriers.
“Verizon and AT&T don’t want seven stock ICS devices on their
shelves,” he said, insisting that he “has to make money” and that
there simply isn’t a way to profit on a device that isn’t
differentiated. “The vast majority of the changes we make to the
OS are to meet the requirements that carriers have.”

Negotiations with the carriers:

Android handset makers: Here are our phones. How would you like us to change them so that you will sell them?

Tuesday, 10 January 2012

But when they use that natural monopoly to start pushing into
other verticals, things get gray. Travel, restaurant reviews, etc,
etc. We see more of it each year.

But this, at first glance, seems decidedly worse. Google is using
Search to propel their social network. They might say it’s “not a
social network, it’s a part of Google”, but no one is going to buy
that. They were late to the game in social and this is the best
catchup strategy ever.

Count me in with MG here. This seems like textbook monopoly abuse: using a legal monopoly in one market (web search) to gain a competitive advantage in a different market (social networking) through bundling. The idea from the outset was to frame “Google+” as an extension of Google, not something new. Hence the name.

It also occurs to me that there’s no company in tech with as many enemies as Google. Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, Facebook, Twitter — Google has taken the fight to all of them. In this sense they’re like Microsoft 15 years ago.

And if you don’t agree with Siegler’s assertion that Apple, for
all their warts, has more of the end-user’s interest in mind than
Google does, I’d just like you to do one simple test. Go into an
AT&T, Verizon, or Sprint store and set out a few Android models
along with an iPhone and maybe a couple “none of the above”
smartphones they sell. One and only one of those phones is going
to be entirely free of the carrier logo. Don’t be under the
illusion that’s merely an aesthetic issue.

I’d argue smartphones and tablets currently meet most, if not all of those needs; therein lies the problem for Ultrabooks. It’s not a consumer problem; it’s an Intel problem, as sales of traditional computers are declining, while sales of tablets and smartphones are rising.

The latest example is on Daring Fireball, a blog penned by John
Gruber, a hardcore Apple fanboy. Responding to news that Samsung
just turned in a barnburner fourth quarter, Gruber wrote:

So Jony Ive leads the design team at the two most-profitable phone
makers. Impressive.

This is typical snarky Gruber stuff. But it’s so arrogant and
patronizing that when I read it was brought up short. Because I
realized, this guy isn’t joking. Gruber and people like him
really believe that Samsung just sits around making copies of
Apple products. In their view, Apple is the fountain from which
all creativity flows, and Samsung just follows behind, stealing
their ideas.

Really? This is where Dan Lyons wants to go? That Samsung doesn’t copy Apple? That “Apple fanboys” simply claim that they do as a knee-jerk response to Samsung’s undeniable success in the smartphone market? Never mind all these remarkable similarities in packaging and product design, or the Apple app icons Samsung put in a store kiosk — it’s all just a big coincidence? It boggles the mind.

Nobody is arguing that every aspect of every Samsung product is a rip-off of an Apple product. Nobody is arguing that Samsung doesn’t have some products that are utterly un-Apple-like. But this is the first time I’ve seen anyone argue that Samsung isn’t blatantly copying at least some things from Apple. I’ve also never made nor seen anyone else make the argument that Apple is the only company doing original work. This is just another case where the person wielding the word fanboy is the one making the over-the-top head-in-the-sand unreasonable argument.

If you want to defend Samsung, don’t do it by arguing that they don’t copy Apple. Go with the “good artists copy, great artists steal” argument. Argue that Samsung may be shameless but they’re not stupid; that it’s no coincidence that the Android handset maker that’s selling the most phones and growing the fastest is the one most closely mimicking Apple.

David Freedman, writing for Discover magazine on the top stories of 2011, “The Man Who Gave Us Less for More”:

But while Jobs has left most of the world with the impression that
he was just so brilliantly right about what the world needed, I
can’t help pointing out that Jobs actually got a lot of things
wrong. Who remembers the Apple Lisa, a chunky desktop that sold
for $9,995 in 1983, or the Newton, a $700 PDA/paperweight?

That’s quite a scathing critique of Jobs’s career: one failed machine from 30 years ago that was created by a team that he was effectively kicked off, at which point he took over the team that created the Macintosh; and, even better, a PDA that was created by Apple after Jobs was forced out of the company, and which he shut down soon after his return.

Then there was the next [sic] computer, to which Jobs devoted a
decade of his life, believing that it would win over academia. It
was well regarded, but with prices starting at $6,500, Jobs sold
only 50,000 units ever, versus the 150,000 he had expected to sell
annually.

Yeah, whatever happened to NeXT and that crazy operating system of theirs?

I used to see Apple’s devoted fans as cultish, but now I’m the one
who’s left in a cult: the shrinking cult of technophiles who want
stuff that above all works well, solves problems, and delivers
real value, and the hell with look and feel.

“The hell with look and feel” says a lot more about Freedman than it does about Apple. 20 bucks says he spent the ’90s railing against GUIs, in favor of the DOS command-line interface.

OK, so Steve Jobs proved to be a brilliant visionary after all.
But there will always be a part of me that resents the fact that
he empowered the world to force me to endure prettier,
more-expensive technology for what will most likely be the rest of
my 150 years.

Personal-computer makers are counting on ultrabooks to challenge
the MacBook Air, Apple’s best-selling laptop, which is less than
an inch thick. Still, Hewlett-Packard isn’t trying to compete on
price: The new Spectre is $100 more than a MacBook Air with a
13.3-inch screen. Hewlett-Packard is emphasizing the laptop’s
premium features and design, a bid to reach the “savvy
fashionista” market, said Page Murray, a vice president of
marketing at the company.

“There’s always someone who wants to win the race to the bottom,”
Murray said. “It usually ends with a splat.”

So, for the record, we now live in a world where HP criticizes Apple’s laptop pricing for leading a “race to the bottom”.

The memory that sticks with me, in fact, is that I was temporarily
dumbstruck by the sheer feel of the device. I was testing it while
sitting with a couple of Apple executives as well as an Apple PR
handler. The idea was that I could try out the device while also
asking them questions. As I used the iPhone, I found it very
difficult to speak questions or even listen to the answers. The
iPhone was so unlike anything I’d ever handled. The brightness of
the screen and the density of its pixels were shocking; the weight
of the small slab was strangely comforting.

It was all in shocking contrast to my phone at the time, a Palm
Treo. I hated it. Every time I went somewhere, I asked myself, “Do
I need to bring my phone with me?” If I could avoid it, I wouldn’t
bring it along. The iPhone would be the first phone I’ve owned
that I wanted to keep in my pocket at all times.

Dan Frommer on Steve Jobs’s claim five years ago today that the original iPhone software was five years ahead of the competition:

If anything, where Apple is the most ahead of Android today —
perhaps even 5 years ahead — is on the business and customer
experience sides.

Apple still seems to have the power in its relationships with
carriers, demanding a clean user experience (no pre-installed
crap), control over software updates and the length of its update
path, a mostly-reliable App Store that makes a lot of money in app
sales for developers, distribution through its own retail stores,
tight integration with Macs and the iPad, and great devices at
great prices. Not to mention an extremely profitable business
model — selling tens of millions of iPhones per year for a big
profit. These things seem to be more iffy in the Android camp.

I agree that these are the areas where Apple is most ahead today. But among the phones I’ve got here in my office right now are a Nexus Galaxy and a Lumia 800 — state-of-the-art phones representing two competing platforms. I also have an original iPhone running iOS 2.2. Web pages scroll the smoothest on the iPhone.

I’m not saying the original 2007 iPhone is a better overall device today than the Lumia or Galaxy. It has very little RAM and a much slower processor and you can feel it. But there are aspects of the original iPhone software — animation, scrolling, touch-tracking — that remain superior to any competition. Was everything about the original iPhone five years ahead of the competition? No, no way — especially in terms of hardware. But some aspects of its software were more than five years ahead.

Ryan Kim, reporting for GigaOM on the latest US smartphone market share numbers from the NPD Group:

In a CES telecom fact sheet, the research firm said that iOS has
zoomed up to 43 percent of sales in October and November, compared
with 26 percent in the third quarter. Meanwhile, Android’s share
dropped from a high of 60 percent in the third quarter to 47
percent in October and November.

I’m chalking this report up as a statistical outlier for now, but maybe this is simply what happens when the iPhone is available on AT&T, Verizon, and Sprint.

Greg Kumparak at AOL/TechCrunch, regarding the news that Microsoft will be offering $10-$15 bounties to retail salespeople to push Windows Phones:

In turn, John Gruber asks: “If this strategy was on the table, why
didn’t Microsoft start this a year ago?”

Here’s why: because it’s an admission of failure.

Microsoft’s obstacle isn’t an easy one. When people walk into a
phone store in search of a new smartphone, the sales dude
generally offers up two choices: iPhone or Android. Meanwhile, the
only people being handed Windows Phones are the ones who asked for
them right off the bat.

Now, why is this? Is it because Apple and Google are coughing up
piles of cash to get the sales reps to push their phones? Nope —
while carriers and specific OEMs might offer spiffs for the sales
of certain handsets, I can’t find evidence that Apple or Google
themselves ever have.

But who cares who is paying the spiffs? Saying that neither Apple nor Google pay them isn’t really a fair comparison if handset makers producing Android phones are. A better way to put it is that there are no spiffs for iPhones, but there are for Android phones. Maybe Microsoft was hoping that handset makers would do this sort of thing for them, but obviously they haven’t. What I’m saying is if they’re willing to do this now, they should have been willing to do it a year ago to gain a foothold in the market as soon as possible.

Obviously this isn’t sustainable in the long run, given that $10-$15 per phone is probably the most Microsoft could be making in licensing fees. But if they were ever willing to do it, it only makes sense to do it as early as possible.

This leaves us with the potential for an interesting face-off. Not Samsung vs Motorola/HTC, but… Samsung vs. Google. As Erik Sherman observes in his CBS MoneyWatch post, since Samsung ships close to 55% of all Android phones, the company could be in a position to twist Google’s arm.

Has any single PC vendor ever controlled that much of the Windows market? I don’t think so.

Saturday, 7 January 2012

Included in the plan are sales incentives for retail workers,
aimed at getting them to finally start recommending Windows Phone
as an alternative to Android and iPhone. The amount of payments
are $10 to $15 per handset sold, depending on the number sold, for
some handset models.

If this strategy was on the table, why didn’t Microsoft start this a year ago?

Paying a dividend and burning down our war chest would jeopardize
all of that.

You see, one day a competitor will come along and cut our core
product line out from underneath us. We will need all the cash we
can muster to fend them off. When that cash is done, we will
mortgage the company. The first several times we may be
successful. However, as is always the case, eventually time will
get the best of us and we will be unable to meet our creditors
demands.

We will go bankrupt. Our creditors will seize the equity and the
shareholders will be left with nothing and having made zero return
on their investment.

Apple should pay its shareholders a dividend because it’s on a course for inevitable bankruptcy. OK. This is why I drink.

The major point here is that Adobe is in play, or at least Apple
thinks so. The company has plenty of cash and stock to do the deal
and plenty of incentive, too. Apple’s goal in acquiring Adobe
would be to control first Flash and second Adobe’s emerging Air
application platform. Adobe announced this week a broad industry
initiative to extend Flash to mobile devices, but Apple wasn’t a
participant. Why bother if you intend to shortly own Flash
outright?

Funny thing is, Apple has a done a pretty good job controlling Flash, at least in mobile. Anyway, you could make a lot of money betting against Cringely’s predictions.

Release a killer tablet. Price this tablet head-turningly less
than the iPad, make it run Ice Cream Sandwich flawlessly, and
offer completely sandwiched-out apps that absolutely scream for
the big screen. Forget trying too hard not to offend other Android
device manufacturers. Googorola should get this tablet exactly
right, down to every last ever-loving detail, with the hardware
and the software teams living, breathing, eating, and sleeping
together on it.

A fine suggestion. But: is there any evidence whatsoever that it’s even possible to make a tablet that is (a) killer, and (b) lower-priced than the iPad? Let’s define “killer” as “as good as or better than the iPad”. I think Google would do very well simply to produce a genuinely killer tablet that matches the iPad on price.

Tim Cook, in 2009 (regarding the iPhone, but I think it applies to the iPad as well): “One thing we’ll make sure is that we don’t leave a price umbrella for people.”

In Android 4.0, Holo is different. We’ve made the inclusion of the unmodified Holo theme family a compatibility requirement for devices running Android 4.0 and forward. If the device has Android Market it will have the Holo themes as they were originally designed.

Less “open” for handset makers and carriers, but better for developers and users. This should be a significant improvement for the platform in a year or two, when most Android phones in use are running 4.0 or later.

This week, John Gruber and Dan Benjamin discuss the TSA,
Siracusa’s and The New York Times’ possessives, financial
transaction processors, Apple Geniuses killing flies with
flamethrowers, an Apple announcement in New York, coin-op arcade games,
and bring the episode to a shocking conclusion.

To me, the bigger issue in this has always been the garbage
content that was produced by the campaign, “thin” material
that Google has fought to keep out of its own search results.
I’m still trying to understand how Google failed to understand
that the marketing companies it engaged with would produce this.

Given how much detail Google professes to put into its marketing,
as I covered yesterday, it still remains amazing that the
company found itself involved with this type of campaign.

Kudos to Google for applying the search results penalty. But what a weird story.

This event will focus on iTunes University and Apple in education.
[…] Steve Jobs was intimately involved with this project before
his passing. He gave a hat tip to the textbook side of this
project in the Isaacson biography.

Larry Downes, in a piece for Forbes that’s shamelessly split across five “pages”:

But the numbers only scratch the surface. To discover the real
reasons behind the company’s decline, just take this simple
test. Walk into one of the company’s retail locations or shop
online. And try, really try, not to lose your temper.

It really is that simple. I find shopping at Best Buy to be insulting and annoying.

The STRIP Act, proposed in the US House of Reps, would require TSA
employees to stop dressing like police officers, because they
aren’t cops, and when they give orders to travellers, travellers
assume that these are the orders of real law enforcement officers,
rather than minor bureaucrats.

Let’s change their title from “officer” back to “screener”, too. (Via Ben Brooks.)

But Washington isn’t just confused about the short run; it’s
also confused about the long run. For while debt can be a problem,
the way our politicians and pundits think about debt is all wrong,
and exaggerates the problem’s size.

Deficit-worriers portray a future in which we’re impoverished by
the need to pay back money we’ve been borrowing. They see
America as being like a family that took out too large a mortgage,
and will have a hard time making the monthly payments.

The whole idea of Vertu — a company (well, a Nokia subsidiary) that sells $6,000 cell phones that are nowhere near state-of-the-art in any regard other than in the use of leather, going into a market against a company like Apple that sells what’s widely held to be the best cell phone in the world starting at just $199 — reminds me of Andy Warhol’s great quote about Coke:

What’s great about this country is that America started the
tradition where the richest consumers buy essentially the same
things as the poorest. You can be watching TV and see Coca-Cola,
and you know that the President drinks Coke, Liz Taylor drinks
Coke, and just think, you can drink Coke, too. A Coke is a Coke
and no amount of money can get you a better Coke than the one the
bum on the corner is drinking. All the Cokes are the same and all
the Cokes are good. Liz Taylor knows it, the President knows it,
the bum knows it, and you know it.

It’s kind of remarkable. I’ve set up a couple of PCs and a few TVs
over the last couple of years. Buying a new television and setting
it up is far more complicated now than buying a computer and
setting it up.

Speaking of Danny Sullivan, he wrote a good piece on Android’s “just buy a new device” software updates, calling it more “clopen” than open:

A big reason behind this mess is that Google doesn’t actually
sell the Android operating system to consumers. If it did, it
would probably care more about ensuring customers (because
that’s what they would be) were covered from start to finish.

The Android 4 page from Google touts all the advantages that
the new operating system offers. The page is written for
consumers. But nothing on it explains how consumers can actually
get the operating system.

It isn’t just that Google doesn’t sell the Android operating system to
consumers. It is that the consumer is Google’s product. Android is a
delivery system to serve the consumer to Google’s target market — the
advertisers. So Google’s customer for Android is not the consumer (with the arguable exception of the Nexus phones), but rather the carriers.

Imagine you’re someone trying to understand the benefits to
using Google Chrome versus other browsers. Out of 21 million
possible matches, two of Google’s sponsored garbage posts make
it into the top ten results.

Geeks can, and do, argue over the merits of these phones. But the
fact that the two are close enough to be compared side by side is
what should have Apple worried. And these are early days. My sense
is that over the next 12 to 18 months, Android will surge past
Apple the way Microsoft Windows surged past Apple in the 1990s.